This Enlightenment HOWTO is my first HOWTO I've ever posted on gentoo forums. I am a big reader of the gentoo forums, and I check them nearly every day. The forum I found most intersting during the past 2 years of using gentoo has always been the Documentation, Tips & Tricks forum. On this occasion I want to thank the gentoo developers for gentoo and to all you guys posting in the forum for giving such a great support. Gentoo is so far the best user supported distribution I have seen and I really happy with that. Well but now let's get started.
I've been using fluxbox until now because I wanted simplicity and the power of customizablity! Well and a few days ago I first tried Enlightenment and I am amazed by it. It's a brilliant Window Manager which combines a few very import aspects :

felxablity

robustness

simplicity

high configurabilty

graphically rich

So if you like having a nice niffty window manager to work in then try Enlightenment.

Enlightenment has been first released in 1997 by Carsten *Rasterman* Haitzler and it's elease revolutionized the face of desktops on UNIX platforms and beyond, featuring a more graphically stimulating enviroment than ever previously seen on a conventional desktop. Since that time the window manager has been emulated and has driven the graphical appeal we see on desktops everywhere. In 2000, the latest major release occured with the release of DR16.0, a release that remains in heavy usage today. In 2003 Kim "kwo" Woelders took over management of the DR16 codebase and released DR16.6, improving opon the window manager and modernizing its dependencies, and even now the DR16 window manager has a long life ahead of itself, even after the release of DR17.

I based this HOWTO on DR16 because DR17 is still in high development although there are CVS ebuilds available for it already. But as there are still many problems with the ebuilds, and sometimes the CVS Code isn't compiling I decided to use and to write about DR16.

For this HOWTO it is supposed that you have a fully working Xorg installtion on your machine, and use gentoo's Portage.

2. Main Installation

The Installation of Enlightenment is farily easy with gentoo, as we can use the power of emerge.
First of all let's compile & install Enlightenment WM first.

Code:

emerge -av enlightenment

Another very useful thing to emerge is edox-data, which is basically a startup documentation and more to help you getting started using enlightenment! It explains for instance how to operate with the mouse in enlightenment and what options you have. Enlightenment makes a lot of use of keyboard and mouse combinations! Which are sometimes very powerful to use. So go ahead and

Code:

emerge -av edox-data

As Enlightenment doesn't use ASCII config files but binary config files instead. The config files are enlightenment Data Base files which can be read and manipulated with a toolkit package called edb I strongly suggest you to get this as well.

Code:

emerge -av edb

That's everything for the main installtion, you can now go ahead and restart your Xorg and load Enlightenment by either doing starte16 or selecting the Enlightenment Session in your Graphical Login Manager.

3. First start

When you first fire up Enlightenment it creates your User Menu automatically, which you can always regenerate again! During this generation Enlightenment looks for all available and known X11, Kde, Gnome, Other GUI Programs that you have installed and creates entries in your User Menu.Your desktop should look something like this.

Desktop explained
On the top of your screen you have the so called Dragbar. It's main purpose is dragging desktops arround, so if you have desktop 0 and desktop 1 you could drag desktop 0 into desktop 1 when you are on desktop 1. Note: this only works when you have more than 1 desktop!

On the bottom-left you have Pager which shows you your desktops and what's on them!

On the bottom-right you have Iconbox. When you minize a window it's beeing minized into the Iconbox where you will see a little "screenshot" of that program, and they are identified by notify messages when you move over them with your mouse cursor.

Mouse actions

Left Mouse clicking on the desktop background will bring the user Menu with various entries of various programs that you have installed. You can leave this menu opend (leave it "sticky") if you hold Left Mouse Button and releasing it on the title of the menu of a submenu.

Middle Mouse clicking on the desktop background will display Enlightenment's main menu. Here you can access the other menus plus more options like Settings & Configuration. Sticky works the same here just with the middle mouse.

Left Mouse clicking on the desktop background brings up the main configuration menu, where you can set up How windows behave, special Effects, Virtual Desktops, Multiple Desktops, ....

ALT + Left Mouse clicking on a Window will enable you to move the window the same way as if you would do Left Mouse pressing on the title bar.

ALT + Middle Mouse clicking on a Window will enable you to resize the window in the same way you would resize a window using a left mouse click on the leftmost buttom margin.

ALT + Middle Mouse clicking on the desktop background will bring up a title list of active application windows. By using CTRL instead you will get a title list of all active applications on the current desktop. By selecting an application in that list will bring that application to the front.

Wheel-Mouse will scroll through the desktops.

Right Mouse click on a title of a window will give you options such as remembering the current position of an application so the next time you start that application it will appear on the same position.

Keyboard actions

Shift+ALT + (Right arrow or Left arrow) to navigate through your virtual desktops.

CRTL+ALT + (Right arrow or Left arrow) to navigate through your desktops.

CRTL+ALT + K kill current on focus application.

CRTL+ALT + Home shuffle windows on screen to be clean. (funny)

For more information consult the edox which we already installed. It's a very helpful guide if you want to know more, and if you want to do more with your enlightenment. To see the documentation just open up a console and type

Code:

edox /usr/share/enlightenment/E-docs/

4. Changing menus

To change menus in enlightenment there are two ways to do it. The hard way, or the easy-use-a-gui way. The hard way is going into your ~/.enlightenment/ directory and editing the files yourself. But that's really straight forward and easy to do.
Basically the main Menu is stored in the file file.menu, just open it and then you see the syntax which is pretty easy to understand. Every submenu is stored in a subdirectory holding a index.menu which again holds information about the applications you want to start. Here's my files.menu and one index.menu file for example, I haven't finished my whole menu yet how I want it to be.

There is a gui for changing the keybindings aswell, it's called e16keyedit and is also available in gentoo's portage, so

Code:

emerge e16keyedit

and start e16keyedit.

6. Installing Thmes

You will find a bunch of good themes on http://themes.freshmeat.net/browse/60/ to install them is pretty easy. Just download the file, decompress them and mv them into ~/.enlightenment/themes/. Here an example with aada's Aqua Theme, which is a MacOS X Inspired Theme, Execute as same user as you are using for your enlightenment session. Note: for most themes you don't need to create a new directory, but remember every theme has to be in a seperate subdirectory in .enlightenment/themes/

I am not going into making enlightenment even nicer, maybe later, but here just a few hints. There are so called epplets, which are little dock apps for enlightenment, there is an ebuild for that as well. Another really nice thing to install is engage, which is a MacOS X like Program bar.

Thanks for reading my HOWTO, I hope it was useful and easy to understand for you.
Cya_________________LinuxCounter: #353618

Last edited by latz-twn on Sat Mar 05, 2005 1:05 pm; edited 5 times in total

well-written introduction. But there's something I don't like: there are no really good themes. Freshmeat is the only archive which has some e16 themes. But I think all of them suck more or less. The most look like a as when they were 3 years old theme. Aqua is an exception.

Very good introduction you have here. I wish I'd known all this when I first tried Enlightenment.

That's exactly why I wrote this, because it is kind of hard to find stuff about enlightenment on the web! The next thing I want to write about is DR17! But only once it has become really useable! Because atm, I have it running, but there are so many things that really annoy me! Just for a little example that you don't have an iconbar! Well I suppose I could use engage to do that! But there are many other things which haven't been implemented yet! So that's probably why I will stick to DR16 for a while now!

Well thx of course for your replies! _________________LinuxCounter: #353618

latz-twn: I have a question. Do you know whether I can change on which mouse button which menu should open? For example, I'd prefer it to open the applications-menu with a right click, like in fluxbox.

I do. In fact, would it be possible for us to set up An Unofficial Enlightenment User's Manual at wikibooks.org featuring your content as a starting point? I've always thought the theming guide/etc needed to be documented more comprehensively...and I think wikibooks.org is the place. I was planning on starting this book up sometime soon -- covering the basics of installation and configuration of both e16 and e17...so whaddya say?_________________My Last.fm profile | get e17!

Hey, jnx I find it actually a brilliant idea and I would love to help writing it! Sorry I was busy the last few days as I played Half Life 2, brilliant Game i am really amazed by it! Really looking forward to the mass of Multiplayer Mods.

Ehum first of just send me a pm with your Icq and stuff! so we can talk to each other a bit easier! Cyas_________________LinuxCounter: #353618

I do. In fact, would it be possible for us to set up An Unofficial Enlightenment User's Manual at wikibooks.org featuring your content as a starting point? I've always thought the theming guide/etc needed to be documented more comprehensively...and I think wikibooks.org is the place. I was planning on starting this book up sometime soon -- covering the basics of installation and configuration of both e16 and e17...so whaddya say?

What's the point in re-inventing the wheel? (regarding E17 installation and configuration, not E16). We already have a 30 page guide translated into 8 languages, and can easily add/rewrite anything that's missing/lacking something (feedback is welcome - I'm not aware of anything missing right now though). I also think everything in one central location would be better.

If your referring to the E17 theming guide that used to be on get-e a while, it was nowhere even near complete, which is why we took it down. If you want to write one for us (the problem is that not many people know Edje well enough to write it, I sure don't), that would be great, as the current author doesn't have much time for it. We are always looking for new staff who have something important to contribute to the project._________________Interested in E17? Get Enlightened by reading the user guide.

hey sweet. it seems to work so far. Elightenment is a bit confused which monitor is my main one (i have multiple monitors)... [edit to add] Nope, it's just me who is confused [end edit]... and i have to get my mouse buttons back the way i want them, but otherwise i like what i see so far.

This is a bit confusing:
Left Mouse clicking on the desktop background will bring the user Menu
Left Mouse clicking on the desktop background brings up the main configuration menu
One of those is a typo. Emerging now.

Left Mouse clicking on the desktop background brings up the main configuration menu

I don't know exactly what is meant by the "configuration menu" as there is no such thing per say in enlightenment. It should either be... Right Mouse clicking on the desktop background brings up the settings menu; or... Middle Mouse clicking on the desktop background brings up the main menu_________________(7 of 9) Installing star-trek/species-8.4.7.2::talax.

Do you know whether I can change on which mouse button which menu should open? For example, I'd prefer it to open the applications-menu with a right click, like in fluxbox.

What you are describing is part of theming. If you use the Aqua theme then the mouse-clicks do one thing, if you use the BlueSteel theme they do something entirely different. With a bit of playing, you can learn to edit your themes to do whatever you like. Otherwise, just choose a theme that does what you like and you're all set.

dwblas wrote:

This is a bit confusing:
Left Mouse clicking on the desktop background will bring the user Menu
Left Mouse clicking on the desktop background brings up the main configuration menu
One of those is a typo. Emerging now.

But again, once you get going with Enlightenment, you will soon build custom menus anyhow. Heck, that's the awsome part of Enlightenment - it is entirely up to you to make it into the perfect desktop._________________Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.

In the event that this subject is still read --I note the last date is 2006!

I use e16 all the time and wouldn't change, but I do miss a direct command line such as that given in kde by alt+f2. It means I must always open up a terminal if I want a command that is not in one of my menus (which I like to keep small)